


someone ready to be found

by PurpleDarkness



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alcohol, Biromantic Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Bisexual Georgie Barker, Gen, No beta we die like archival assistants, Oxford, Pre-Canon, Smoking, University, bit of a character study of georgie, blink-and-you-miss-it-romantic-jongeorgie, brief mentions of alex's death, frankly gratuitous amounts of it, lightly implied but authorial intent babeyyy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 06:48:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29397903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PurpleDarkness/pseuds/PurpleDarkness
Summary: “You know you can always talk to me, right? I’m just down the hall in B326. I know this place is rough, everyone always blustering about like they know what they’re doing. All full of what brilliant thing they’ve said in this tutorial, and what internship they’ve got lined up for summer vac. Probably in daddy’s firm. But it’s okay to be struggling-”“I wouldn’t say I’m struggling,” retorts Jon, prickly.“Okay, if you ever want to talk to a fellow survivor then,” says Georgie, with a huff of laughter.“There are worse things to survive than Oxford,” Jon is quieter, picking at a bit of moss on a roof tile.“Yeah, I know,” she says, looking sideways at his bony profile, “I know that.”----An exploration of how Georgie and Jon first got to know each other, at university.
Relationships: Georgie Barker & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 4
Kudos: 28





	someone ready to be found

**Author's Note:**

> Quick glossary, this fic is full of Oxford nonsense but the only terms you should need to understand it are:  
>  **Balliol College** \- Oxford Uni is made up of 38 colleges, which all have their own rooms for students, libraries, bars, admin systems and act like little communities. Balliol is where Georgie goes in canon.  
>  **JCR** \- Junior Common Room, essentially a student council/union for each college where undergrads hold elected positions.  
>  **Bop** \- Just imagine a school fancy dress disco, but add cheap alcohol.

When Georgie returns from her suspension of studies, she decides that she really couldn’t give a fuck about hiding her accent anymore. Hiding anything anymore. 

Getting her pastoral tutor to agree to let her suspend studies for a year to return home and process Alex’s death, and her new reality, was hard enough. Her fear was gone, but shame still shadowed her as she mechanically followed the rigmarole of collecting a reference from the student counselling service and a letter from her GP and emails from her tutors for various papers testifying that she would likely fail her exams if she sat them. 

She’s considering how to do things differently this time; she has no interest in repeating that year. She wants to take her fearlessness and run with it, carry a bit of Alex with her every day. She’s switched degree subjects and is excited to forge her own research path. She’s considering trying to breach the horribly incestuous theatre circles again, to act. She thinks she’ll run to be JCR Welfare Officer in the Michaelmas elections. Alex’s response to this place was to fight and Georgie’s was always towards flight, but she thinks, this time, she’ll stay. She’ll help.

She’s volunteered to help man the welcome desk for freshers in the porter’s lodge. This is unconventional, given she is now also a first year again, but, as she figures, second years mostly live out of college, so everyone she greets will be her new neighbours. She’s wearing a ‘Balliol Freshers’ Week 2005’ t-shirt and her biggest smile.

Almost everyone is here with an entourage, a gaggle of parents, siblings, and so on, but she’s taken by this person, standing still in the maelstrom of the plodge, watching. He has two battered suitcases that are practically the size of him and he’s gripping them as if his life depends on it. He’s somehow looking outwards and inwards at the same time. She catches his eye and smiles wildly at him, until he drags himself over to the welcome desk.

“Hi, I’m Georgie. Welcome to Balliol! How was your journey?”

“Oh, um, fine? It’s a direct train from Bournemouth to Oxford, and then not far from the station to carry my things, so, you know - good?” His accent is crisp and posh, but with none of the assurance that usually comes with it.

“Fab, good to hear! If I could just have your name?”

“It’s Sims, Jonathan,” he says, hesitantly. Georgie skirts her finger down the list of names.

“You’ll be in B315, that’s my corridor! Great views of the quad, but I’d avoid the communal showers, they never run hot - you can always use the ones on the next floor down,” she smiles conspiratorially, “here’s your freshers’ week schedule, freshers t-shirt and if you tell the porters your room number, B315, they can give you your key.”

He meticulously folds the freshers schedule, slings the t-shirt over his shoulder and disappears back into the melee. 

*****

Georgie’s nightmares don’t scare her anymore, but her sleep is not restful. She frequently wakes, clammy under the thin college issued duvet, her thoughts sitting heavy on her mind in the purple darkness. Her usual solution is to brew some decaf green tea, the mindless motions of it notching her down, ready to face bed again.

On this occasion, around a month into Michaelmas term, she awakens, Alex’s blank face staring at her, burrowing into her. She tries to sit with it a second, stare back, but it’s too much. So she gets up, slides on her slippers and pads down the hall to the kitchen.

She softly opens the door to find a slight figure silhouetted against the dark window. There’s a phantom smell of smoke on the air. She thinks faintly that this is something that she should be scared by. 

“Hello?”

The figure starts. It’s that first year from down the corridor - Jonathan? - and he seems more freaked out than her, dropping the cigarette he’s smoking out of the wide ajar sash window.

“Ah - damn!”

“What are you doing here?” she asks, levelly. She flicks on the light switch, illuminating his panicked face.

“I, ah, I- could ask you the same thing.”

“I’m making some tea, not illegally smoking out of a window?”

Jonathan seems to come to himself. “Oh christ, right, sorry.”

“It’s alright, I’m not the porters and I’m not gonna call them. I am, however, the JCR Welfare Officer. So, like, in that capacity, are you quite alright?”

“Everyone keeps asking me that.”

“And?”

“You know, I’m not quite sure.”

Georgie pauses, makes a decision that she has no way of knowing the significance of, and then heaves a dramatic sigh. “Alright, Jonathan, it’s roof time.”

“It’s Jon. Jon Sims. And what’s... roof time?”

“Ah, young padawan, that’s for me to know, and you to find out.”

Jon is surprisingly open to the idea of jimmying the window at the end of the third floor corridor, and clambering out. 

Here the roof sits at about a forty five degree angle to the adjoining wall, letting you wedge yourself between its slope and brickwork. If you shimmy along further, the wall and roof run out and it’s a steep drop down, but Georgie’s never gone too far. She doesn’t think she’d be a good judge of how safe the edge might be. 

“Ta da!! Roof time.”

She’s on the outer edge, looking down to the quiet quad below, and rests her slippers up against the bricks, relaxing into position. Jon lets out a disbelieving chuckle and fishes another cigarette out of his oversized jacket pocket.

“Those’ll kill you, you know,”

“Says the girl on the roof.”

“Fair deuce, Jonathan-Jon,”

Jon looks at her, curiosity in his eyes. “How did you figure out you could get out here, anyway?”

“An old friend showed me, quite a while back,” Alex had grabbed her hand, mischief in her eyes, several pints deep in the college bar. Georgie had been moaning about how her tutorial partners, Westminster wankers the pair of them, had talked over her the whole tutorial, even though it was obvious she was the only one who had actually read the critical texts. How Oxford had started to feel suffocatingly heavy, full of these tedious men, and the sneering women in beautifully tailored coats and tutors who didn’t seem to think her voice needed any space. And Alex had seen that, and not tried to talk her down, tell her her experiences weren’t valid. Instead she had taken her up, out into the night sky. Up here.

Jon takes a long drag of his cigarette before focussing his gaze, quite intensely, on her. “I’ve been meaning to ask - are you a first year?”

“Well, I am, but I suspended studies for a year, came back, switched from English to Archaeology and Anthropology and started first year again. Now here I am!”

He quirks an eyebrow and returns his attention, too closely, to his smoking. This information seems to have quietened him; he’s evidently picked up on the general Oxford stigma around suspending studies pretty quickly. It’s seen as a weakness, an admission of fault, something not to be talked about. Georgie really does hate this place sometimes.

“You know you can always talk to me, right? I’m just down the hall in B326. I know this place is rough, everyone always blustering about like they know what they’re doing. All full of what brilliant thing they’ve said in this tutorial, and what internship they’ve got lined up for summer vac. Probably in daddy’s firm. But it’s okay to be struggling-”

“I wouldn’t say I’m struggling,” retorts Jon, prickly.

“Okay, if you ever want to talk to a fellow survivor then,” says Georgie, with a huff of laughter. 

“There are worse things to survive than Oxford,” Jon is quieter, picking at a bit of moss on a roof tile.

“Yeah, I know,” she says, looking sideways at his bony profile, “I know that.”

They share a silence that Georgie could swear is weighty with an understanding that she has not encountered before. She suspects she shouldn’t probe any deeper. 

They sit, the two of them, together in their loneliness for a while, looking up at the vast, empty expanse of the sky, before wordlessly folding themselves back through the window, into real life. 

*****

Georgie was casually interested in horror and ghosts before losing her fear, losing Alex. Her early theatrical instincts emerged, torch under her chin, telling ghost stories at Guide Camp. She’d go to the Odeon in town with her mates, clinging to each other and shrieking at jump scares in the latest releases. She’d overanalysed The Bloody Chamber in A Level English, revelling in the inching anxiety of things left unsaid, horrors behind locked doors.

Now, though, it’s an all consuming obsession. She researches down winding rabbit holes for the most horrifying, harrowing tales, buying up pulp novels from Oxford’s many second hand bookshops, blue light illuminating her face in the college computer room at 3am deep on chat threads. But none of it works. Nothing can spark that fear in her. 

After making certain of that, it’s then less trying to poke at her fear, or lack of it, and more looking for some evidence that this is something that anyone else has experienced. She doesn’t think talking about Alex would help her but she desperately wants to know that she’s not alone in this. She can’t shake the feeling that she’s seen the edge of a much bigger tapestry. A terrible, horrible, no good, very bad, spooky tapestry. 

Today she’s digging deeper into her current research spiral on witchcraft and the supernatural. She’s repeating the shelf reference number for her quarry, ‘133.43 STE’, over in her head like a chant so diligently, that she almost walks into Jon, standing hunched over, staring intently at the stacks. 

“Hey there, roof boy, whatcha looking for?”

Jon straightens up and looks at her, a thousand yard stare focussing in as he surfaces.

“Oh - Georgie, hello. I’m looking for ‘The admirable historie of the possession and conversion of penitent woman’,” he rattles off, “it should be in this section but I just can’t find it.”

“Oh, I looked at that last week! You’ll need to go to Laurie, the Head of Rare Books, and request a session in the Rare Books Collection. They keep the stuff in there temperature controlled and in low lighting ‘cause of their age. That one’s a right laugh, in college’s copy some ye olde sceptic has written ‘Foolish’ big on the title page so it reads ‘The Foolish admirable historie’.’”

“Nothing wrong with a bit of healthy scepticism,” says Jon, sniffily, “what are you looking for today, then?”

“‘Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumours and Gossip’. I’ve read the abstract and it looks like it sort of synthesises witchcraft and the supernatural and the idea of rumours? Like, seeing how gossip catalyses accusations of witchcraft, and all the social violence behind that, and then it’s got this whole variety of ethnographies within it, like - vampires in Africa!” 

She realises she’s pitched up to a volume too loud for the library. If she listens closely she can practically hear the DPhil students wishing death upon her.

“Anyway, sorry, I’m just quite jazzed up about the anthropological approach at the moment, just going down my research tangents, rather than having to read whatever Old English text the English faculty thinks is the word of God.” 

“No no, don’t apologise, that does sound interesting,” and he actually sounds like he genuinely means it, which is rare, for Georgie. Generally people glaze over when she gets too energised, her Scouse creeps in, and she’s been told, outright to her face, that she sounds like an excitable child.

“Really?”

“Oh yeah, I’ve been reading up on Balliol’s history which is a far less noble pursuit. Did you know that the Oxford Phasmatological Society started here? It was around in the latter 19th century which makes it the earliest psychical society in existence. They met here in F. S. C. Schiller’s rooms - I can’t quite work out which of the buildings that would have been in though. Of course, Schiller was also a raging racist and literal founding eugenicist. So, uh,” he pauses, suddenly self aware, “I’ve decided to try a new tact. Hence my fruitless search for the admirable historie.”

“You sound like you’re pretty into all of this,” Georgie is delighted by this new side of Jon, intense, interested, all pretense abandoned. An idea grips her. “You should definitely think about applying for the Library Studentship over summer vac. It’s a pretty cool programme; they pay you, let you stay in college rooms and introduce you to academic library and archival work. I’m definitely throwing my hat in the ring, and they take two students a year.”

“That… that actually sounds pretty great, Georgie, thanks,” says Jon, “I know it’s a bit embarrassing to want to research college, terrible antiquated place that it is, but I just like to know everything I can, you know? Makes me feel at ease in a place,”

“Your secret is safe with me,” jokes Georgie. 

*****

Georgie is on drunk tank duty. The technical JCR term is ‘managing the quiet room’, but it’s common knowledge that after 10pm, it switches from being the chill crafts zone, to where the bop wardens shepherd their woozy flock. Georgie just has to sit it out, and make sure nobody chokes on their own sick, or worse, is sick on the sticky carpet. Then, come the blessed stroke of midnight, the assorted rabble sets off to the afters at Lola’s and become someone else’s liability.

The first bop of Hilary term is known for being hectic. Everyone is fizzing with the frenetic energy that comes from a month and a half trapped back in their sedate home towns. The Ents Officers have capitalised on this with an 80s theme that has left a good half of the undergrad population shivering in Jazzercise leg warmers and hotpants. Hall is rammed and thumping with Abba, Bar is heaving with the overspill, and Georgie is just praying nothing goes tits up before she can retreat back to her room.

She’s babysitting the queasier half of the Village People when Anya deposits a worse for wear Jonathan Sims in the ratty armchair by the door. His sunken eyes are rimmed with smudged kohl and he is wearing, of all the things, skin tight leggings. It’s a lot to take in. 

As it looks like she might be encroaching on the builder and the cowboy’s wobbly flirting anyway, she rapidly abandons them in favour of working out quite what Jon has on his head.

“Hello, Jonathan, what brings you here?”

“Oh, hello Georgie,” a hiccup, “Georgina.” 

“Hmm?”

“Oh, ah - I’m not sure? I went back to Bar to buy another boptail, excellent by the way, you really ought to try one, and Anya pulled me out of the queue. Something about cutting me off?”

Georgie crouches down to his eye level and tries to look stern.

“Jon, just how many boptails have you had, exactly?”

A solemn, contemplating silence from Jon, whose blond wig was starting to droop precipitously.

“Many?”

“Right,” she can’t help but giggle, and that sets Jon off, a smile curling his lips, which, upon inspection, are slick with lipgloss. Something curls in her stomach.

“Who are you anyway?” she asks, looking away from the way Jon’s edges seem to have softened.

“Jareth,” he dramatically intones, in a timbre that sits naturally on his tongue, “The Goblin King.”

Georgie squints at Jon’s ruffled white blouse. “From Labyrinth - Bowie, right? I guess I can see that, if you had a half decent wig. Great choice.”

“Who are you then?”

“I am Georgina Barker,” she says, putting on her best schlocky voice, “Guardian of the Drunk Tank and Protector of Those Sobering Up Just Enough to Be The Lola’s Bouncers Problem and Not Mine.”

“So you’ve not got a costume?”

“That’s what you got from that?”

“I put a lot of effort into this costume, I’m not sure everyone else got the memo,” he says, pissily, “Those people are literally a builder and a cowboy, how is that 80s?”

“ _Jonathan Sims_ , show some respect to the Village People! That’s an important piece of queer culture right there.”

“Oh, right,” he says, “I’m... still reading up on that? I can’t say the Village People were my top priority.”

_Still reading up? _Georgie’s heart catches in her throat a little. She’s all big bravado with her bisexuality, but she’s still desperately seeking connection. She thought she had seen something in Jon, a mirror of herself, and maybe this is it.__

____

__

“We could go to Plush, if you want?” she says. She’s never been. She’s heard the years above talking about Oxford’s only gay club, sweaty limbs writhing under stone archways to a familiar cheesy playlist. _Community_. And she wants it, okay? She can pretend all she wants that she’s tough and fearless and doesn’t need anyone, but one of those things isn’t quite true.

“I- I don’t think that’s quite my scene,”

“Right-o,” she says, a little disappointed, realising Jon might not be quite as straightforward as she thought, “what is your scene, then?”

He takes a beat or two to answer.

“I don’t know that I have one,” and oh no, he’s looking like he might be sliding into the sad drunk stage, and Georgie is terrible with sad drunks. She always wants to solve other people’s problems and drunk people never want their problems to be solved. They want to marinate in their sadness. 

“Have you seen Nellie, the college cat? I saw her this morning, by the bike shed,” it’s a hard conversational swerve, and not one Georgie thinks she’ll pull off, not everyone loves cats as much as she does. But Jon’s eyes light up, like a drunk man presented with cheesy chips. Or a drunk man presented with a cat anecdote, in this instance.

“I have! She tried to follow me into the laundry room last week,” he smiles, absently and fondly, “I bet she likes to sleep on top of the tumble driers.”

“I’m sure she’d like to,” says Georgie, quietly suspicious that she’s only just scratching the surface of the enigma of Jonathan Sims. However, Jon’s starting to well up just at the thought of their friendly resident black cat, so she thinks it’s time to beat a tactical retreat.

She finds Anya in the Bar plying cups of tap water on what looks like the members of The Breakfast Club and begs her to cover the Drunk Tank (“Quiet room,” Anya gently chides) until she can herd Jon back to his room.

The main college site isn’t that big but Jon is meandering. He stops to toe at the edges of the quad lawn with a lecture on why they should be allowed to walk on the grass then, in the same breath, rants about whoever keeps leaving oily pans in their kitchen sink. On someone else this could read as sanctimonious but there’s a spark of levity in drunk Jon that has Georgie laughing with him as he describes bashing the culprit over the head with their own frying pan. 

The moonlight catches the sandy stonework of the college chapel and Jon’s cheekbones, illuminating their angles both, and Georgie shakes her head at the luck that’s brought her here, to this weird place.

By the time Georgie gets Jon to his door, he insists on a detour via the laundry room to check for Nellie the cat, he’s slid into drunken sleepiness, starting to melt into Georgie’s side. 

She peels him off to let him wrestle with his door while she collects a glass of water from the kitchen and a paracetamol from her room. By the time she returns, he’s passed out, in full costume, on top of his covers. His curtains are still open and the glow of the night casts shadows over his teetering piles of books and his shirt and chinos from before the bop, draped over his desk chair. She leans over to place the glass and painkiller on his bedside table, taking in the way Jon’s face softens in sleep, and the kohl smudge on his white pillow. 

She hopes he’s quite alright. 

*****

On her way back from Sainsbury’s the next morning, blessedly un-hungover, Georgie drops into the mailroom. There in her pidge, nestled between the Christian Union invite she keeps ignoring and a letter from the council about registering to vote, she finds an envelope with her name scrawled on it in fountain pen blue. Curious, she rips it open while winding her way back to her room, juggling her shopping bags. She pulls out a crisply folded note.

“ _Dear Georgie,_

__

__

_My apologies you had to see me like that last night. Nevertheless, thank-you for tending to me. Could I buy you a pint to show my gratitude?_

_Sincerely,  
Jon_’

She smiles and opens her door.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for indulging my brain-splurge on this fic, this podcast has consumed my life!! Intended as a one-shot but if the spirit of processing-my-university-experience-through-Georgie-Barker takes me again, who can say...


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